TOON LAATSTE

Exploring the Intranet HiveCairo Walker from StepTwo Designs provides another perspective on managing intranets. He introduces the "hive" concept that explores the following in a two part article (part 1, part 2):

The Six Lessons of KivaStanford Magazine has a terrific article about Kiva called Small Change, Big Payoff by Cynthia Haven. This is the story of how Matt and Jessica Jackely Flannery created it to enable people to make micro loans to entrepreneurs around the world.

The results are awesome: more than 123,000 people have loaned more than $12.4 million to 18,000 entrepreneurs. In fact, there so many lenders that there’s are individual limits so that everyone can make a loan. The process involves reading a short profile about each entrepreneur and then deciding which to fund. From beginning to end, you can make a loan in under five minutes if you’re a slow typist. Lenders do not earn interest though the micro-finance organizations that helped Kiva find the entrepreneur does. Entrepreneurs pay 99.67 percent of the loans.

Here are some lessons that any entrepreneur can learn from the Kiva phenomenon:

Create meaningful partnerships.

Catalyze and support evangelism.

Find a business model.

“Bank” on unproven people.

Focus on free marketing.

Ignore the naysayers.

Yup, there’s a lot any entrepreneur can learn from the Kiva story. More importantly, why don’t you go to its web site and make a loan? You could co-invest with me in Chhorn Yan, mother of six in Cambodia, who needs capital to expand her home-based, offline grocery store. One way to look at this is we could fund one Webvan or 800,000 Chhorn Yans.

What Are Adventure Playgrounds?In short, adventure playgrounds are places where children can create and modify their own environments, rather than relying on rigid equipment that only serves a limit set of programmed purposes:
“In a sense, you and I have always played in ‘adventure playgrounds.’ We created a fort in the kitchen cabinets, jumped from couch to couch across oceans; we snuck out through a hole in the fence to a new world. We climbed trees and hid in bushes. We played in the mud and the rain. We chased each other, made secret worlds...”

So How Did Adventure Playgrounds Get Started?Believe it or not, modern adventure playgrounds began with wastelands of World War II. Designers then had the idea to institutionalize these spontaneous and accidental junk playgrounds. Initially the principle point was to encourage a more natural form of play, but increasingly the emphasis has been on sustainability and hands-on building, allowing children to create and ‘own’ their playgrounds.

What Are the Benefits of Adventure Playgrounds?Reasonable risk can be healthy, according to those who support the adventure playground movement: “The opportunity to be able to access a rich play environment, and assess and take risks, is paramount for the healthy development of all children, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and creatively.”

We created spaces with whatever we could find around us. Some of us played in abandoned buildings, or barns, or vacant lots between buildings, used what we found and made up stories of our lives to be. Here you go, hammers, saws, nails, wood, tires, rope, cloth, whatever you can find. Make it your own.
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As a follow-up to my post on Amazon’s crippled and hideous Kindle, and the discussion at Mark Pilgrim’s place, I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2004 2001. It’s offered under a CC license, for a limited time only. I’m not sure how limited that time will be, so grab it while it’s hot.

23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking StudiesEye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your webpage.

Text attracts attention before graphics

Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page

Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right